Zombie Drug Rep

Pharmageddon 2012 – the end of an era for pharmaceutical marketing?
"According to a story from MedAdNews, Pharmageddon 2012 is an experimental lab on social medias where communications agencies Friday Morning and S+R Medical Communications expose – in a very unusual and somewhat anonymous way – the findings of a round-table discussion they have had with doctors in early 2009. It’s meant to shed a light on the state of the relationship between healthcare professionals, the pharmaceutical industry and the marketing efforts behind pharma products by using an analogy to “2012“. They use the social media with apocalyptic scenarios to tell that story in quite an entertaining way."
Link

Pharmageddon 2012

More fun videos are here
http://www.youtube.com/user/pharmageddon2012

NYT: Dr. Drug Rep

Dr. Daniel Carlat tells us how he and other physicians are wooed - and very well paid - to become "Doctor" drug reps.
He is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report.

As the reps became comfortable with me, they began to see me more as a sales colleague. I received faxes before talks preparing me for particular doctors. One note informed me that the physician we’d be visiting that day was a “decile 6 doctor and is not prescribing any Effexor XR, so please tailor accordingly. There is also one more doc in the practice that we are not familiar with.” The term “decile 6” is drug-rep jargon for a doctor who prescribes a lot of medications. The higher the “decile” (in a range from 1 to 10), the higher the prescription volume, and the more potentially lucrative that doctor could be for the company.

A note from another rep reminded me of a scene from “Mission: Impossible.” “Dr. Carlat: Our main target, Dr. , is an internist. He spreads his usage among three antidepressants, Celexa, Zoloft and Paxil, at about 25-30 percent each. He is currently using about 6 percent Effexor XR. Our access is very challenging with lunches six months out.” This doctor’s schedule of lunches was filled with reps from other companies; it would be vital to make our sales visit count.+

Naïve as I was, I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies. This may include deciding which physicians to aim for, as my Wyeth reps did, but it can help sales in other ways. For example, Shahram Ahari, a former drug rep for Eli Lilly (the maker of Prozac) who is now a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy, said in an article in The Washington Post that as a drug rep he would use this data to find out which doctors were prescribing Prozac’s competitors, like Effexor. Then he would play up specific features of Prozac that contrasted favorably with the other drug, like the ease with which patients can get off Prozac, as compared with the hard time they can have withdrawing from Effexor.

The American Medical Association is also a key player in prescription data-mining. Pharmacies typically will not release doctors’ names to the data-mining companies, but they will release their Drug Enforcement Agency numbers. The A.M.A. licenses its file of U.S. physicians, allowing the data-mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The A.M.A. makes millions in information-leasing money.

Once drug companies have identified the doctors, they must woo them. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown teamed up with Ahari (the former drug rep) to describe the myriad techniques drug reps use to establish relationships with physicians, including inviting them to a speaker’s meeting. These can serve to cement a positive a relationship between the rep and the doctor. This relationship is crucial, they say, since “drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”

Link

Former drug rep Gwen Olsen talks about manipulating doctors.

25 Shocking Facts About the Pharmaceutical Industry

Image: Valley of the Dolls, movie, 1960's

From the Nursing Online Education Database

25 Shocking Facts About the Pharmaceutical Industry

By Laura Milligan
Researching and snagging an adequate, wallet-friendly health care plan is tough these days, despite its high-profile presence in political debates. A large part of the controversy over expensive health costs stems from criticism of high-priced medications marketed by powerful pharmaceutical companies. From Medicare fraud to CEOs worth billions of dollars, big drug companies are accused of putting profits above patients, spinning false PR campaigns and more. We've uncovered 25 of the most shocking facts about the pharmaceutical industry in this list.
Some excerpts:

The price of drugs is increasing faster than anything else a patient pays for: Marcia Angell writes in her book The Truth About Drug Companies that "drugs are the fastest-growing part of the health care bill which itself is rising at an alarming rate."

Your doctor may have an ulterior motive behind your prescription: In 2007, the St. Petersburg Times reported that drug reps often give gifts to convince doctors to prescribe the medications that they represent.

Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than research: According to ScienceDaily, a "new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development."

Brand name meds often have a 1,000% mark-up price: Many Americans are aware that brand name prescriptions cost more than generic meds.

Read the rest here

Pharma Drug Rep Tells All

Ex-Drug Sales Rep Tells All
Former Eli Lilly Rep Says He Wined and Dined Doctors to Make a Sale

By MARCUS BARAM
—

To sell their drugs, pharmaceutical companies hire former cheerleaders and ex-models to wine and dine doctors, exaggerate the drug's benefits and underplay their side-effects, a former sales rep told a Congressional committee this morning.

Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zypraxa for Eli Lily, told a Senate Aging Committee chaired by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., that his job involved "rewarding physicians with gifts and attention for their allegiance to your product and company despite what may be ethically appropriate."

Ahari claims that drug companies like hiring former cheerleaders and ex-models, as well as former athletes and members of the military, many of whom have no background in science.

"On my first day of sales class, among 21 trainees and two instructors, I was the only one with any level of college-level science education," Ahari told ABCNews.com on Tuesday.

During their five-week training class, Ahari claims that instructors teach sales tactics, including how to exceed spending limits for important clients, being generous with free samples to leverage sales, using friendships and personal gifts to foster a "quid pro quo" relationship, and how to exploit sexual tension.

"The nature of this business is gift-giving," says Ahari. He claims that he's heard stories about sales reps helping to pay the cost of a doctor's swimming pool and another doctor who was routinely taken to a nightclub where a hostess was paid to keep him company.

Drug reps develop a positive view of their drug and a negative view of the competitors, according to Ahari. "You drink the Kool-Aid. We were taught to minimize the side effects and how to use conversational ploys to minimize it or to change the topic."

According to Ahari, the benefits could be lucrative for sales reps, who tended to earn more than researchers. On top of a base salary for starting reps of $50,000, "there were four quarterly bonuses, an annual bonus, stock options, a car, 401K, great health benefits, and a $60,000 expense account."

Read the rest here.

From Furious Seasons: Lilly's Zyprexa documents in video form

"The Zyprexa Chronicles: Zyprexa Documents Hit YouTube!
A UCLA PhD candidate in History who's a reader of this site came upon a genius idea: making a video of himself reading one of the Zyprexa documents on YouTube. His name is Brad Fidler (website) and the document he chose (ZY100175096 4.1 MB .pdf) had details of a little role playing game Lilly wanted Zyprexa reps to play in order to increase their knowledge of the drug. The document is quite large, so please use my bandwidth sparingly, and is the primary "Viva Zyprexa" campaign roll out in 2000. The game is called "Family Feud" and is on page 61 of the 67 page document.
Yes, the game sounds weird, but I recall from my own pharma company reppin' days that during sales training reps often acted out various roles--doctor, nurse, purchasing agent, etc.--with one another so we could sell our products better."

And...heeeeere's the game card!


Many thanks to Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons for bringing this to our attention.
Go see him here

UPDATE: LILLY SETTLED FOR $15M
Pocket change for them